Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

The streetcar had a pair of bars running horizontally under its nose to prevent exactly this, but they hadn’t been checked in several weeks, and Fa’ad was a slender man – slender enough that his feet slid right under the safe bars and his body then pushed them vertically upward and out of the way–

–and Max felt the dreadful thump-thump of his passage over the man’s body. Somebody would call for an ambulance, but they would be far better off calling a priest. This poor schlemiel would not ever get to where he was going, the fool, saving time at the cost of his life. The fool!

ACROSS THEstreet, Mahmoud turned just in time to see his friend die. His eyes imagined more than saw the streetcar jump upward, as though to avoid killing Fa’ad, and just that fast his world changed, as Fa’ad’s world ended for all time to be.

“JESUS,” BRIANthought, twenty yards away, holding a magazine in his hands. That poor fucker hadn’t lived long enough to die of the poison. He saw that Enzo had moved down the opposite side of the street, perhaps figuring to pop him if and when he’d gotten across, but the succinylcholine had worked as advertised. He’d just picked a particularly bad place to collapse. Or a lucky one, depending on your point of view. He took the magazine and crossed the street. There was an Arab-looking guy by the drugstore whose face was even more upset than the citizens around him. There were screams, a lot of hands to mouths, and, damned sure, it was not a pretty sight, though the streetcar had stopped directly over the body.

“Somebody’s going to have to hose down the street,” Dominic said quietly. “Nice pop, Aldo.”

“Well, I guess a five-point-six from the East German judge. Let’s get moving.”

“Roger that, bro.”

And they headed right, past the cigarette store, toward Schwartzenberg Platz.

Behind them there was a little screaming from the women, while the men took it all more soberly, with many turning away. There was not a thing to be done. The doorman at the Imperial darted inside to summon an ambulance and the Feuerwehr. They took about ten minutes to arrive. The firemen got there first, and for them the grim sight was immediate and decisive. His whole blood supply, so it seemed, had spilled out, and there was no saving him. The police were there, too, and a police captain, who’d arrived from his station on nearby Friedrichstrasse, told Max Weber to back his streetcar off the body. It revealed much – and little. The body had been chopped into four irregular pieces, as though ripped apart by a predatory creature from prehistory. The ambulance, which had come, was stopped not quite in the middle of the street – the street cops were waving the cars along, but the drivers and passengers took the time to look at the carnage, with half of them staring with grim fascination and the other half turning away in horror and disgust. Even some reporters were there, with their cameras and notepads – and Minicams for the TV scribblers.

They needed three body bags to collect the body. An inspector from the transit authority arrived to question the motorman, whom the police already had in hand, of course. All in all, it took about an hour to remove the body, inspect the streetcar, and clear the road. It was done rather efficiently, in fact, and by 12:30 everything was back in Ordnung.

Except for Mahmoud Mohamed Fadhil, who had to go to his hotel and light up his computer to send an e-mail to Mohammed Hassan al-Din, now in Rome, for instructions.

By that time, Dominic was on his own computer, composing an e-mail for The Campus to tell them of the day’s work, and ask for instructions on the next assignment.

“YOU’RE KIDDING,”Jack said at once.

“God, grant me a dumb adversary,” Brian responded. “That’s one prayer they teach at the Basic School. Trouble is, sooner or later they’re going to get smart.”

“Like crooks,” Dominic agreed. “The problem with law enforcement is that we generally catch the dumb ones. The smart ones we rarely even hear about. That’s why it took so long to do the Mafia, and they’re not really all that smart. But, yeah, it’s a Darwinian process, and we’ll be helping to breed brains into them one way or another.”

“News from home?” Brian asked.

“Check the time. They won’t even be getting in for another hour,” Jack explained. “So, the guy really got run over?”

Brian nodded. He’d gone down and been run over like the official Mississippi state animal – a squashed dog on the road. “By a streetcar. Good news is that it covered up the mess.” Tough luck, Mr. Raghead.

IT WASN’Teven a mile to the St. Elizabeth’s Krankenhaus on Invalidenstrasse, where the ambulance crew carried in the body parts. They’d called ahead, and so there was no particular surprise at the three rubberized bags. These were duly laid on a table in pathology – there was no point in their going to casualty receiving, because the cause of death was so obvious as to be blackly comical. The only hard part was to retrieve blood for a toxicology scan. The body had been so mauled as to be largely drained of blood, but internal organs – mainly the spleen and brain – had enough to be drawn out with a syringe and sent off to the lab, which would look for narcotics and/or alcohol. The only other thing to look for in the postmortem exam was a broken leg, but the passage of the streetcar over the body – they had his name and ID from his wallet, and the police were checking the local hotels to see if maybe he’d left a passport behind, so that the appropriate embassy could be notified – meant that even a broken knee would be almost impossible to discover. Both of his legs had been totally crushed in a matter of less than three seconds. The only surprising thing was that his face was placid. One would have expected open eyes and a grimace of pain from the death, but, then, even traumatic death had few hard-and-fast rules, as the pathologist knew. There was little point in doing an in-depth examination. Maybe if he’d been shot they could find a bullet wound, but there was no reason to suspect that. The police had already talked to seventeen eyewitnesses who’d been within thirty meters of the event. All in all, the pathology report could just as easily have been a form letter as a signed official document.

“JESUS,” GRANGERobserved. “How the hell did they arrange that?” Then he lifted his phone. “Gerry? Come on down. Number three is in the bag. You have to see this report.” After replacing the phone, he thought aloud, “Okay, now where do we send them next?”

That was settled on a different floor. Tony Wills was copying all of Ryan’s downloads, and the one at the top of the download file was impressive in its bloody brevity. So, he lifted his phone for Rick Bell.

IT WAShardest of all for Max Weber. It took half an hour for the initial denial and shock to wear off. He started vomiting, his eyes replaying the sight of the crumpled body sliding below his field of vision, and the horrible thump-thump of his streetcar. It hadn’t been his fault, he told himself. That fool, das Idiot, had just fallen down right before him, like a drunk might do, except it was far too early for a man to have too many beers. He’d had accidents before, mostly fender work on cars that had turned too abruptly in front of him. But he’d never seen and hardly heard of a fatal accident with a streetcar. He’d killed a man. He, Max Weber, had taken a life. It was not his fault, he told himself about once a minute for the next two hours. His supervisor gave him the rest of the day off, and so he clocked out and drove home in his Audi, stopping at a Gasthaus a block from his home because he didn’t want to drink alone this day.